Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

EVENTS

RNC Chair Wants Blue States to Split Electoral Votes

Since their voter suppression schemes around the country didn’t prevent the Democrats from winning the 2012 election, the Republicans are now floating a different plan to rig the vote in their favor by splitting the electoral college votes — but only in states that tend to vote Democratic in presidential elections, of course. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus thinks that’s a swell idea:

“I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red ought to be looking at,” Priebus said of the plan to change how electoral votes are granted.

Such a system “gives more local control” to the states, he argued.

Ah yes, “local control.” Republicans love local control, except when they don’t. Just like they love federalism, except when they don’t. Republicans in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin have proposed that the electoral votes of those states be split up rather than being a winner-take-all system. Thus, if the Democratic candidate gets 55% of the vote in those states, they only get 55% of the electoral votes rather than all of them.

But why is “local control” better than, say, voter control? If this had been in place in 2012, Romney would have won the election despite losing the popular vote by five million votes. Those states have the ability to pass such a plan; Maine and Nebraska already have similar systems. But doing so in larger states would be nothing more than a naked power grab, a way to rig the system in their favor while ignoring the actual vote totals. Would anyone by at all surprised if they actually try to do it?

Comments

It’s worse than that, Ed. They want to hand out the electoral votes by congressional district, like Nebraska and Maine. Which means that every 10 years they can gerrymander the districts to keep Congressional seats. In places like Pennsylvania, they’d have won something like 13/18 electoral votes – whilst Obama carried the state.

This sucks cause there’s nothing that the purple states can do about it. We vote Democrat, but gerrymandered districts made our legislatures red. Those legislatures will pass these changes, they will game the system, and we will have Republican presidents from now until the end of the country. I can send messages to my congressmen but they’re all Democrats anyway.

Any politician advocating this scheme should be asked why they don’t support signing the Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote, commonly called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. It’s a pretty easy way to highlight their hypocrisy and motivations and to cut through rhetoric about how the popular vote is more fair. (It may or may not be more fair, but it certainly isn’t fair to have it in some states and not in others on the basis of whether those states are solidly Republican or not.)

If they seriously try to do this, we must take to the streets. Implementing this would be the end of whatever shambles of democracy we have left. Everyday I’m more and more convinced that parlimentary democracy is a far superior system – that more closely reflects popular sovereingty.

Here in California where you can buy your way onto the ballot, this has been proposed at least once I can recall by initiative process. The morons who surround me in this redneck part of the state would go for it in a hot second. And they’d see nothing wrong with Obama losing with 5 million more votes–“his votes should only count 3/5 anyway.”

The republicans sure do spend a lot of time working on ways to rig the system, rather than change their platform to coincide with what most people would support. Makes you wonder what their true motivation is (no it doesn’t).

“I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red ought to be looking at,” Priebus said…

In other words, “If the majority vote Democratic, but we’ve managed to gerrymander the House districts in our favor, let’s tie the electoral votes to our successful gerrymandering schemes, and extend our subversion of majority rule to the Presidential level.”

I have no problem with the idea if it’s applied across the board. Its probably unconstitutional for the fed to demand the states assign their electoral votes representationally, but as a voluntary state decision, so long as pretty much every state does it at the same time, I’m okay with it.

I’m obviously not okay with targeting states of a specific color and doing it only to them.

I can envision something like an alternative to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Of course we would have to decide which of the two systems we wanted (district-by-district electoral votes, or block vote for national vote winner) because they’re mutially exclusive.

You are aware that the districts have been gerrymandered, right? In many of the purple states, every vote that goes towards a Republican Representative is equal to multiple votes for Democratic Representatives. If the entire nation was a district-by-district vote, we wouldn’t be 4 days from Barack Obama’s second inauguration, we’d be 4 days from Mitt Romney’s first inauguration – despite his being 5 million votes less popular.

Aren’t all of these things pretty transparent efforts to limit the effectiveness of votes from urban areas….in other words, Republicans saying “is there a way we can legally make black votes count less?”

What annoys me no end is that there was a constitutional amendment on the Ohio November ballot to get rid of gerrymandering (Issue 2) and it was voted down by a significant margin supposedly because of the success of ads saying it would just generate moar big unaccountable government.

Winner-takes-it-all is indeed a massively stupid system that needs to go and be replaced with proportional representation. But that reform needs to take place everywhere at once. Not just where it’s convenient.

Yes, but it’s not just that – it’s liberal votes in general. Plus, cities also tend to have higher concentrations of women. They can kill two birds with one stone.

Right now, with the electoral college, the midwest is already heavily weighted. The amount of electors vs. the number of voters in a state isn’t really all that fair. A vote in Nebraska counts several times the weight of a vote in California, when you consider how many voters each elector represents. In spite of that, they weren’t able to pull off their planned defeat of Obama. So now they want to shift it even more.

I just want to underscore the mindset we are dealing with here. This is not just hypocrisy for many conservatives, this is deliberate suppression:

In discussing the electoral college and popular vote with a generally honorable conservative friend, I tried getting him to justify his opposition to replacing the EC with popular vote. He stated it was because it would disadvantage conservatives. Thinking he might not be seeing the big picture, I pressed for clarification, pointing out that under the current system his vote was worth much less than the vote of some other states’ residents. He firmly stated he was fine with that sort of disproportional representation as long as it favored conservatives.

fifthdentist @11: Oh, they don’t want to get rid of the electoral college itself–just control how it works. After all, if we went to a pure popular vote, those large rural states would suddenly suffer an implosion of import, as they lost all those tasty, tasty, Senate-representation-derived electoral votes.

I’m not sure you understand their objective even if it was extended to all the states. The end result would not lend itself to an effective substitute for a popular election, but instead even more disproportionately among voters than we have now. Their objective would result in rural voters’ vote counting even more than they do now relative to urban voters.

I know gerrymandering has been taken to the courts on more than one occasion already, and it’s gotten nowhere, but isn’t there a group out there developing new legal strategies to fight this sort of thing on constitutional grounds? After all, what’s more fundamental to equality than the concept that everyone’s vote is of equal value?

shouldbeworking“This proposal makes the Canadian parliamentary system look much more sane than yours.”
Even if true, the Canadian system wouldn’t survive in DC. For one thing, the snow forts would melt in the spring, summer, and fall.*

* “Spring”, “summer” and “fall” are the seasons in between “winter” and “winter”.

The republicans sure do spend a lot of time working on ways to rig the system, rather than change their platform to coincide with what most people would support.

They can’t. Literally.

Thanks to gerrymandering, most republicans on both the state and local level are more afraid of facing a primary opponent who is even more bat shit crazy than they are afraid of losing in the general election. So, they have no choice but pander to the crazy if they want to stay in power.

After all, what’s more fundamental to equality than the concept that everyone’s vote is of equal value?
[emphasis mine – MH]

I really like your use of fundamental here. I agree, and yet we have a Constitution which does not protect this fundamental right, but instead provides powers which result in enormous disproportionality among voters on the federal level.

I happen to live in the state of Michigan, a state which voted twice for Barack Obama; and yet our state legislature has a filibuster-proof Republican majority. We see this in other states as well, I believe Pennslyvania’s another example of a big state with the same result.

Anyone in the major parties advocating for instant run off (preferential voting), for all levels of government?
No?
How about proportional voting for representative houses so that half the seats are locally elected representatives but the other half are regionally proportional – this helps curb the effects of gerrymandering.
How about adding in a non-partisan procedural approach to district boundaries.
I cant wait till democracy gets out of beta.

Of course. Just as I’m sure you’re aware that gerrymandering per se does not favor republicans, it favors whichever party is currently/locally in power. Currently republicans dominate via gerrymandering, but for most of the 20th century, it was democrats that benefitted from it. GOP gerrymandring has contributed to them winning 8 of the last 10 congresses. In contrast, democrat gerrymaneding contributed to them winning 30 of the 32 congresses before that. So now, you tell me which party gerrymandering has generally favored.

The point I’m making here is, gerrymandering is a structural problem. Its somewhat separate from the issue of who would reap the benefits from a district voting scheme now. Its not a ‘republican’ tool, its a political tool wielded by both parties.

Heath @25:

Their objective would result in rural voters’ vote counting even more than they do now relative to urban voters.

You both give good arguments for why a popular vote would be more representative. I do see gerrymandering as a different issue that needs to be fixed in and of itself (and when it is, district voting becomse reasonable), but I see your point. District voting is a system which is fair in principle, but given the realities of gerrymandering, is less fair in practice than other options we could implement. A fair-in-theory system should generally not be favored over a fair-in-practice system..